Curriculum at Aspire
We will create the conditions to support students to learn and flourish in and through love.
We change lives.
Our curriculum overview
Our Vision
Aspire aims to ensure that our curriculum ensures students are safe, loved, and learning and that they are working towards a transition into a positive destination.
Aspire's vision is to support young people, whatever their background and circumstances, to: Build strong foundations, and open new doors. We are led in everything we do by two ‘red thread’ questions: “what is best for the child?” and “how can we make that happen?”
And we encourage staff to always reflect on these questions, and to always ask themselves: “how would I feel if this was my child?”
Curriculum entitlement
The curriculum across our schools may differ; designed to meet the needs of the different cohorts we cater for. However, they will all be designed to ensure that children are safe, loved and learning, and that they are working towards transitioning into a positive destination that is appropriate for them.
Intent
All Aspire schools and services will have a clear overarching intent for their curriculum, as well as clear intents for each subject area within that curriculum. We understand the intent of the whole curriculum to include:
- The need to prioritise work around pupils’ personal development and reading. We view this is as reading being a gateway to accessing the whole curriculum.
- Strategies for pupils to find their voice in positive ways, understand their past and develop strategies for a positive future.
- The knowledge and skills that pupils in a particular school, service, or subject need
- What pupils will take away with them. This may be very different for a pupil on a preventative 12-week placement compared to a student completing a 2-year GCSE course with us.
- Clear sequencing of content where knowledge and skills build on what has been taught before enabling students to know more and be able to do more.
- Clarity around how the curriculum identifies and addresses gaps in knowledge and skills.
- High aspiration for all our pupils that develops a culture of high challenge.
- A varied curriculum offer ensuring we create equity across the MAT.
As a provider of secondary Alternative Provision, most of our schools and services do not educate children from the start of year 7 to the end of year 11 or 13. This means that our curriculum must be adaptive to meet the changing needs of our young people.
Implementation
The implementation of the curriculum will look different in our different schools and services, but it will revolve around four interwoven curriculum pillars:
- Literacy as Access
- Personal Development as Core Curriculum
- A Strong Academic Core
- Nurture/Trauma-Informed Pedagogy
See the attached Curriculum Overviews below for more details on each of the four pillars.
We always provide:
- Teachers with appropriate subject knowledge and subject knowledge support networks.
- High quality teaching and learning, including teachers who present information clearly, check pupils’ understanding, ensuring that students embed concepts in their long-term memory and give high-quality feedback that enables students to make progress.
- Adaptive approaches that ensure all pupils thrive, both with us and when they leave us.
Impact
Schools and services will adopt a wide range of measures to help them evaluate the impact of their curriculum. These include:
- Attendance
- Progress in SEMH
- Progress in reading ages
- Academic progress
- Outcomes for leavers (e.g. year 11 outcomes)
- Reintegration rates (either back to mainstream or onto a suitable destination)
Please click here to see the Alternative Provision curriculum overview.
Please click here to see the Shortenills Forest and Shortenills Abbey curriculum overview.
